Territory completes its first year of existence as a quarterly with this, its third issue--titled Arizona--and does so bearing one of the least text-heavy mastheads anyone is likely to encounter, at just two names: editors Nick Greer and Thomas Mira y Lopez. Currently the magazine is searching for a poetry editor and a web designer. Apply if you are at all inclined in either area: Territory is a project you’ll want to be involved with, as I hope to demonstrate in this review. What has been accomplished in three issues with only two people is astounding and beautiful.

Maps are the organizing principle of Territory; in fact, its catalogue of issues is called an atlas. And notice the magazine’s unusual URL: themapisnot.com. Not what? As explained by Greer and Mira y Lopez in the About page, “The map is not the territory, surely, but then why is our world built on so many getting this so wrong?” The editors therefore invite complex responses to maps old and new, to how maps at once clarify and distort. Toward this end they solicit essays, fiction, poetry, art, video, and music for issues that are either themed--Utopia and Underworlds have preceded Arizona--or open, and provide links to databases of maps for those interested in submitting work. This is a wonderful idea for a literary magazine, and the idea is carried out with extraordinary style.

The lexicon of cartography permeates Territory: Arizona--a legend provides links to the editors’ statement about the issue, the maps used by the writers, and a Google map giving the locations of all the contributors, the latter establishing the issue’s genius loci, to use the mystery-rich Latin phrase of the editors. The attention to detail even extends to those who stray off the edge of the map, as I did when I tried to find legends for the previous two issues by adding “-legend” to the end of each issue-specific URL. Instead of a 404 File Not Found message, I got a page full of this:

The territory you’re looking for has no map, indeed.

A brightly colored tourist map of Arizona from a decade long past adorns the landing page, superimposed over a desert scene done in the pale tones of an old lithograph. This specimen of carto-kitsch is bracketed by the names of this issue’s fifteen writers, a group that includes a few who are new and emerging--Denry Willson’s contributor’s note tells us he is “a student at the University of Arizona”--but which tilts heavily toward writers with MFAs, PhDs, multiple publication credits, books, and teaching posts. For those planning to submit, a paraphrase of the old mapmaker’s warning seems apropos: “Here be heavyweights.”

Each piece is accompanied by a relevant map or maps, photographs, and some, such as Will Cordeiro’s “Habitation for the Days,” add a lovely sensation of text that floats above additional illustrations, obscuring and revealing said images as the words scroll up. Cordeiro’s essay on the architect Paolo Soleri and his Arcosanti experimental community north of Phoenix smoothly widens and narrows its focus, now on individual members of the community, now on the life and vision of Soleri, whom Cordeiro paints as part visionary and part crackpot, with each description supported by ample evidence. The comparison of Arcosanti to one of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities is perhaps the most apt literary reference Cordeiro could have made, and for that, applause.

Though nonfiction outnumbers fiction in this issue, there are nevertheless several good offerings here, among them Sam Martone’s “Pretending.” Here, Tombstone, icon of the Old West and yet utterly dependent on tourism for its continued existence, is the setting for this first-person story of of young Taylor, son of an OK Corral gunfight re-enactor. Taylor’s father is one of the outlaws, and worse, the outlaw who runs away rather wait to get gunned down by the marshals. This hierarchy of Wild West justice is replicated in the play of the re-enactors’ sons: those with marshals for fathers lord it over those with outlaws. When finally Taylor’s father gets a break and moves from villain to hero, the change to marshal’s son still does Taylor no good: his former friends withdraw from him, the pretend antipathy between frontier good and evil poisoning his life and leaving him at the end to savor a pretend death at the imaginary six-shooters of the outlaws’ sons. Martone’s technique and voice throughout are assured as he navigates a path between quiet pathos and gentle humor.

Almost every piece in this issue deserves mention. One, Maya Kapoor’s “The Castaways,” explores Zillow images in a “Recently Sold Homes in Barrio Viejo” listing to examine flipping, gentrification, and redlining, and in doing so obliquely comments on soon-to-be President Trump’s politics of exclusion, while Justin St. Germain’s “A Real Community” analyzes a Sanborn Company fire insurance map of Tombstone to show, among many other things, how quickly a map can age to obsolescence: “If it were thirty-five years older, this map would show Mexico. Ten years older, a plateau called Goose Flats, and whatever white person made this map would’ve been too afraid of Apaches to make it.” Francisco Cantu, in “Clearly Marked Ghosts,” works from the map of the desert he drew by hand when he was a Border Patrol agent, juxtaposing his map with one by Humane Borders that marks each migrant death with a red dot. There are many red dots. And Caitlin Horrocks’ “Baseline” braids elements such as the Roman god Terminus, a pair of serial killers who plagued Tempe during the time she lived there, and surveying practices in a gem of an essay that contains knockout observations like this one:

When Phoenix’s downtown grid was established in 1870, the east-west roads were named after early American presidents. The north-south streets were named after Native American tribes. Jackson Street intersected Mojave, Papago, Yuma, Cocopah, Hualpai, Yavapai. Early Phoenix property owners could purchase land at the intersection of a proponent of genocide and those who survived it.

Elsewhere in the issue, six writers were given an assignment titled “Arizona Highways.” Each was told to holster her or his smartphone, given instead “a Rand McNally road map of Arizona, a bag of sunflower seeds, and a Slim Jim,” and asked to take a road trip. The resulting work is documented, and gathered together in a clever image map that divides the state into six portions, one for each writer. They cover much territory, both literally and figuratively, including Lawrence Lenhart’s search for a rare black-footed ferret, in which we learn (among the many things we learn in this essay) that there is such a thing as a line of endangered species condoms, which come, if I can use such language, printed with a conservationist couplet: “Don’t go bare...panthers are rare” being one such example. Meanwhile, Mike Powell excavates the Great American kitsch to be found in Tucson’s Map & Flag Center, and the aforementioned Denry Willson maps his enterprising attempts to avoid the assignment, procrastination that involves watching Apollo 13, a diversionary tactic that results in one of my favorite passages:

I began to see the assignment as something that had gone horribly wrong and had to be miraculously helped back to earth by teams of physicists in Houston. In this metaphor I am Tom Hanks as astronaut Jim Lovell and the moon is meaning made out of my interaction with the map.

I must stop at some point, so it might as well be here, with the moon and Tom Hanks. You should, however, visit Arizona and explore the fabulous Territory from which it came.